Category Archives: People

A while back I wrote a post called Top 10 Reasons Ghosts Don’t Exist. It remains, without question, the most popular thing I’ve written on this site. Thank you to everyone who has read it!

I recently re-read my own article and found my arguments to be a bit weaker than I remembered, and this meant that I had to go back to the drawing board and bolster my thoughts. With that in mind, I decided I’d throw a few more reasons onto the pile to make my point even clearer.

Pretty interesting arguments made here, though I think an overlooked point is that the “fast” programmers are younger and, hence, cheaper. A couldn’t afford to be top heavy with people edging up on retirement. Yes we all wish it, but it isn’t possible.

I’ve worked in many high-tech startup companies in the San Francisco Bay area. I am now 52, and I program slowly and thoughtfully. I’m kind of like a designer who writes code; this may become apparent as you read on 🙂

Programming slowly was a problem for me when I recently worked on a project with some young coders who believe in making reallyfast, small iterative changes to the code. At the job, we were encouraged to work in the same codebase, as if it were a big cauldron of soup, and if we all just kept stirring it continuously and vigorously, a fully-formed thing of wonder would emerge.

I’ve been experimenting with some alternativepasswordmanagementschemes lately, which got me to thinking: what will replace passwords? They’ve been around a very long time, and yet remain largely unchanged as a mechanism, despite their ubiquity. They’re a little like toilet paper: they’re antiquated, they’re a pain in the ass if you use them too often, and they usually aren’t strong enough. Think of all of the things that have advanced so much in society over the last one thousand years, and passwords are still just some junk you remember. So what can be done about the fact that the only thing protecting out secrets is only as good as toilet paper?

There comes a time in the lifecycle of every technology where it’s given a name based on some preconceived notion that the technology itself makes obsolete. For example, the term “horseless carriage” is given to something with the assumption that carriages require a horse, and so, therefore, the thing that sets the “horseless carriage” apart from a “carriage” is that it lacks one. The tern “cordless phone” has this same shortcoming. But does this make sense? At what point do we stop referring to something by its antiquated nomer, and just call it like it is?